


You can’t feel a thing

by shipcat



Category: Naruto
Genre: (mentioned) - Freeform, Animal Death, Gen, M/M, Man vs. Nature, Minor Character Death, Sasori hunts for food for Kakuzu, Sasori is a puppet and is written as such, an unlucky rabbit crosses his path, some body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-15 03:04:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14782457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipcat/pseuds/shipcat
Summary: In a canon divergent AU where Kakuzu and Sasori are partners, an incident with Kakuzu causes Sasori to obsess over his sense of touch, and lack thereof.“Kakuzu.” Something in Sasori rattles when he speaks. “You’re back.”“Of course I am.” Kakuzu jams the arm into the loose socket, not caring that it is backwards. It will fix itself soon enough. “I know how much you hate to be kept waiting.”Sasori looks at the red, gritty palm prints that encircle the bicep of the retrieved arm. Several touches which he never felt. He twitches and looks away, face cracking with some unseen emotion.“… you should have come sooner.”





	You can’t feel a thing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my friend [Akasunaa](https://akasunaa.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr, as well as all my fellow KakuSaso shippers out there.

Sasori’s partnership with Kakuzu is a distant one, drawn together by a shared hobby of hoarding body parts and their mutual preference for solitude. On occasion they will bicker, and when they do it is over petty things, like whether art is worth collecting (only when it lasts forever, they agree, or when it accrues more value over time); or whether this biography of the Third Shinobi War is biased (a stalemate—while the author argues that the daimyo share fault for the war, Sasori contends that the inflexibility of the Sand led to their downfall).

When the arguments fall silent, they have a peaceful companionship that is occasionally interrupted by a fit of nostalgia, where they share old, dead stories about old, dead people over tea and a game of Go.

It is rare that they touch each other; rarer still that Kakuzu is the one to initiate the contact. But it happens, usually when Sasori is not paying attention—when Kakuzu passes him a sealed scroll which contains all their traveling gear, for example, or brushes too close in the cramped art studio carved into the wet walls of a cave just outside of Amegakure.

Kakuzu leans over his back, chin just over a crop of windswept red hair, to peek at a puppet with a face painted in the kabuki style. He points a dark brown fingernail to its unpolished forehead. “You missed a spot.” His knee nudges the back of the puppeteer’s leg.

Sasori blinks, and he misses it. “Go count your money and leave me be,” he absentmindedly replies. He is working on the chest now, carefully inserting several poisonous spikes into the ribs to shoot out at his command. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Hm.”

There is a moment when even the air holds its breath. Then Kakuzu frowns and pulls away. If anyone were to ask him about the close encounter, he would blame the small studio.

Sasori waits until Kakuzu exits the room before hastily applying a layer of glaze to his puppet’s wooden face.

***

It starts with something fairly ordinary: Kakuzu sifting through the battlefield for salvageable parts, a quirk which he has picked up over the years due to a constant need for new hearts. It is only reinforced by Sasori insisting that they recover each and every one of his puppets, even if they are shattered beyond repair.

He picks up an arm, nearly crushed by a rock spear, only for it to try to squirm away. Kakuzu tightens his hold, raises it up to his face to inspect the blue strings latched onto the delicately carved lines of the fine persimmon grain. A drop of bitter smelling poison seeps from a break in the ball-joint wrist. He knows it is Sasori’s, even if his partner is nowhere to be seen.

It tugs on Kakuzu, urging him onward. He follows the taut blue chakra strings to Sasori, leaning heavily against a boulder, the wood of his left leg and side split apart, looking somewhat distraught.

“Kakuzu.” Something in Sasori rattles when he speaks. “You’re back.”

“Of course I am.” Kakuzu jams the arm into the loose socket, not caring that it is backwards. It will fix itself soon enough. “I know how much you hate to be kept waiting.”

Sasori looks at the red, gritty palm prints that encircle the bicep of the retrieved arm. Several touches which he never felt. He twitches and looks away, face cracking with some unseen emotion.

“… you should have come sooner.”

***

Things change, as they tend to do, no matter how much Sasori clings to the eternal.

The blood comes off as Sasori glues himself back together, filling in the holes and patching together parts. Within three days he is good as new; within a week his entire collection is pristine; by month’s end, he has designed a puppet, Hiruko, to prevent this sort of vulnerability from ever happening again.

Kakuzu does not mind the new addition to the team, nor that Sasori now travels inside its hollowed husk, observing humanity with Hiruko’s paranoid glass eyes. It’s none of his business what Sasori does with his art, he claims, even if it adds another wall between him and his partner.

Sasori, however, is reluctant to call it a success. The world seems darker through Hiruko’s eyes, less colorful, more remote. There is something missing which he cannot place. Hiruko plods along the dusty road with Kakuzu, and Sasori putters about inside him, testing the mechanisms for hours on end. They cross through the muddied terraces of Rice Paddy country and through the sulphuric Land of Hot Water, trading the occasional quip or banter.

Sasori is not in the mood to talk, though. There is something missing. What is it, what? It is there, at the tip of his tongue…

***

Hot Water cools, then freezes. They pass into the Land of Frost within a fortnight, though Sasori only notices when one fat snowflake lands on Hiroku’s eye, half blinding him. He sneers.

Sensing a burst of chakra, Kakuzu looks back, only to see a drop of water trickle down the bottom of Hiruko’s eye and onto his cheek. Sasori clenches his hands, and Hiruko’s eyes narrow in a glare.

“What is it?” he says, voice growling through the guttural modifier.

Kakuzu shakes his head and turns his eyes to the road ahead, scanning for enemies as usual. Snow flutters around his head, gathers in the grove of his collar. He shivers, almost imperceptibly, and sweeps it away from his cloak.

Sasori does not move, taken by the sight of his partner showing a hint of weakness. His stillness is unnatural, he knows. They are in the Land of Frost in the middle of winter, thousands of miles above sea level. He should be shaking too.

In that moment, Sasori realizes what exactly is missing:

He has not felt anything in years.

***

Curiosity overtakes him, and Sasori pours over his memories, searching for the last time he had touched, or had been touched by, another.

In fuzzy sepia tone, more like a dream than reality, he recalls four arms wrapped around him. His mother’s long, oaky hair tickles his nose.

He ruminates over the echo of warmth until the day sinks below the mountains and they are forced to make camp in the absence of a proper town. Neither of them are pleased about the delay.

“Your puppet is not moving well,” Kakuzu testily remarks. “Put it back in the scroll. We will catch up on lost time in the morning.”

By now, Sasori is just as irritated that he did not plan Hiruko to have all-terrain capabilities.

“I told you. His name is Hiruko, and he was made to battle, not plow snow.”

“ _It_ is a glorified snow plow,” Kakuzu bites back. “And not a good one at that.”

He is right, but Sasori refuses to concede. “If we leave now, we will arrive at the Hidden Frost Village before midnight, and meet the client before daybreak. As _scheduled_ ,” he adds, as if the emphasis means anything to Kakuzu.

It does not.

Kakuzu raises a brow at Sasori, then scoffs. He opens his briefcase and pulls out the scroll with their tent and camping supplies.

“Don’t bother,” Sasori says, “Let’s just leave.”

The next thing he knows, the scroll bounces off his face and into the deep snow below. Hiruko’s tail arrives to block the attack one second too late.

“If that were a fire jutsu, you’d be dead.”

“ _You_ …”

“Your so-called battle puppet—“

“—Hiruko—“

“—Is useless in this weather,” Kakuzu finishes.

“I’ll show you useless.” Sasori grips Hiruko’s tail, coiling it around him. Its stinger curves down, pointed towards his partner.

When Kakuzu exhales, a cloud of moisture escapes from under his mask, spiraling up into the pines above them. There is a stiffness in his arms and a raggedness in his breath that suggests exhaustion.

Revenge would have to come later, then.

With a snap of his fingers, Hiruko’s back clicks open. Sasori emerges from its core, a few stray snowflakes immediately settling in his hair. He looks down at his partner’s hands, blue at the edges, and scoffs.

“Hm.” Kakuzu shoves his arms into his cloak sleeves. “So you finally listen to reason.”

“Shut up.” Sasori recovers the scroll and viciously slings it at his partner, who catches it without looking.

“You do not need to sleep, so I will rest first.” Kakuzu unrolls the scroll, pricking his thumb. He swirls his black blood into a worn sigil in its center. “You will take watch. We will leave once the snow has died down, and we will arrive on time.”

“Fine,” Sasori bites back.

There is a rush of smoke, and Kakuzu disappears into the newly materialized tent, leaving Sasori outside to ruminate. He puts Hirkuo back in a waterproof scroll for safekeeping, then idly scouts the surrounding areas for danger, with only the far-off howl of a wolf to keep him company.

***

Sitting under the bowing branches of a Japanese cedar tree, Sasori watches, wonders, and waits.

For a while, anger simmers underneath the surface, but as the temperature drops, so does his fury. The grey sky fades into purple, then dark slate; precipitation turns into a blizzard, sheets of sleet dropping off the pine needles and onto Sasori, turning the red Akatsuki clouds pink, then white.

He does not bother pushing it away or moving to a place with less snowfall. It is not uncomfortable—at least, not to him—and it makes for good camouflage, at any rate. If he closes his eyes, Sasori can pretend that he is buried in the sand back in the desert, waiting for his next unfortunate target to cross his path.

“A scorpion hiding in the snow…” he murmurs to himself. “Ridiculous.”

When was the last time he was cold? He struggles to remember. Probably back when he left his village, before he turned himself into his puppet. He remembers ducking into a circle of cacti to avoid a search team from Suna and spending the night shivering, half-covered in needles; and before that, huddling in the dunes with the poisoned Komushi, who had passed before the sun could even rise.

Looking back, he knows there was a prickle of pain, the sting of grief, the fading warmth of human skin. But he has long forgotten what felt like, what it is _supposed_ to feel like. Should he be glad that it’s gone?… could he even feel happy at all?

The wind roars through the nearby ravine as he turns these questions over in his head. With each tick of his pocket watch, more signs of wildlife are covered by the relentless snowfall.

At the ninth chime—midnight, the hour of the rat—an arctic rabbit springs out of a frosted bush . It peers at Sasori, eyes glossy and black. Its long whiskers quiver as it sniffs him curiously, then hops right into Sasori’s blue chakra threads.

It’s almost pathetic how easily it breaks.

He tugs on the body, dragging its limp frame to his position under a tree, skinning it with a spare scalpel. His fingers pet the reddened fur in an attempt to trace the residual body heat, scratching it behind the ears. He feels nothing, and it does not move.

The rabbit is a scrawny little thing, with more gristle and bone than actual flesh, barely fit to whet the appetite of a man half Kakuzu’s size. But food is food, and his partner—unlike Sasori—needs to eat. He quickly chars the meat with his built-in flamethrowers, melting all the snow around him.

With the rabbit well-done and the ice gone, he takes the downy pelt and cuts it in half. Then, he takes the two pieces and works them into large, hand-like shapes with precise threads of chakra. They will serve as passable gloves, at least until they reach the shelter of the village.

Sasori slips the scalpel, meat and gloves into his cloak. He runs his fingers along the barbed arm of the evergreen tree before trudging towards the tent.

“Kakuzu.” Sasori pushes aside the flap and enters, not bothering to close it. A half-foot of snow follows him inside. “It’s time to go.”

“I’m aware.”

Kneeling on the ground with his back turned, his partner rolls up a sleeping bag. He is already fully dressed in a fur-lined Akatsuki cloak zipped up and wrapped tightly around him.

“Move faster, then,” Sasori retorts.

Kakuzu turns to give him a sharp look, mask unclipped on the side of his head gear. Several ebony locks slip out from under the pale cloth, just barely tickling square copper cheekbones. Though the stitches in his jaw look rough and unseemly, they make his hair seem soft in contrast.

He finds he wants to touch.

“Be patient.” Kakuzu returns to his previous chore, sealing the camping gear into scroll. The sleeping bag disappears with a poof, followed by a pile of folded blankets, a pillow, a toothbrush and other bathroom supplies, until the only things which remain in the tent are Sasori, Kakuzu, and the faint smell of something burnt.

Kakuzu tugs the mask onto his face, fiddling with the black clips. His hands are no longer blue, though they have not regained their healthy luster.

Sasori snatches the cloth from stiff fingers and snaps the mask on. “I wouldn’t have to be patient if you weren’t so damn slow.”

“I wouldn’t be so slow if this Sunan veil wasn’t so poorly crafted.”

“You know I made that.” Sasori yanks on the mask, forcing his partner to look him in the eye. “You’re trying to piss me off.”

“Hm.” Kakuzu lets himself be drawn closer. “Maybe.”

“You know what happens when I get angry…”

Kakuzu flinches as perfectly carved fingers curl underneath the black cloth. Frigid knuckle joints nudge Kakuzu’s sharp jawline, then unfurl, blindly exploring his face; palms press against two disfiguring lines, an Akatsuki ring catching on the large stitches. A thumb brushes by the edge of his eye, then strokes the corner of his mouth before quickly departing, sweeping a stray lock of hair into the cotton cowl.

Sasori is about to lift the mask when Kakuzu stops him, brows furrowed.

“You can’t feel a thing,” he begins, voice creeping with something unsaid. “But every inch of you is cold.”

“… oh,” Sasori says. “Oh.” The mask rustles as he pulls away, Kakuzu’s red-green gaze stabbing into him all the while. The gloves and food sit heavy in his coat pocket.

The two exit the tent in silence. While Kakuzu puts away the tent, Sasori wordlessly summons two all-terrain puppets to serve as their scout and rearguard on their way down the mountain to the Village Hidden in the Frost.

Sasori lingers behind, letting Kakuzu take the lead with the scout puppet. It bounces past his partner, wooden teeth chattering in the snowy gusts. The rearguard, in contrast, clatters after them loudly, limbs jerking along with each irate twitch of Sasori’s fingers.

The lack of sensation is humiliating, almost mortifyingly so. How can he, as an artist, face his partner when his own body—his supposed masterpiece—is dead in one of the ways that matters the most?

Kakuzu’s cloak whips at his side, an occasional glimpse of tattooed tan skin poking through the sleeve cuffs. The hands which had pushed him away were now just as exposed, just as _cold_ as Sasori.

The storm eases up as the two arrive at a road at the bottom of the valley, lined by stone lanterns perched on the top of granite pillars. Lit by purple fire, the path splits into several other winding trails with dancing purple flames—all illusions leading away from the Village Hidden in the Frost. Sasori takes the lead, sending out chakra strings to feel for traps in front of them. Kakuzu hovers behind him as the puppeteer works, slowing his pace to match Sasori’s shorter steps. The scout puppet hovers by Kakuzu, thin limbs swaying with impatience.

When at last they arrive to the village, Sasori moves to the back, hiding his face underneath his collar, and waits for his partner to bribe the guards for entry.

Rubbing his chin, Kakuzu scans the high city wall, topped with barbed wire and icicles sharpened into pikes. Then his arm drops by his side; a single tendril runs down the muscle of his forearm, reaching toward the scouting puppet, and plucks one of Sasori’s blue strings. It twangs like a harp, soft and divine, before the sound is muffled by the pure snow.

The vibrations reach Sasori in an instant. His eyes go wide as his heart jolts up, chakra core lurching towards his partner.

“Akasuna…” Kakuzu murmurs, blue string trembling with the low frequency of his voice. “Wait until we get to the inn.”

The scout and rearguard puppets jump, rattling slightly, as Kakuzu tugs on his heartstrings once more. He finally turns to the watchtower, sifting through his pockets for money, unaware of the shock zipping through Sasori.

Words tumble through his mind, but nothing fits. There is nothing he can say that would suit this situation or the feeling of warmth—actual _warmth_ —which radiates down the string and into his chest; there are no ways to describe the zing of pleasure as Sasori realizes that yes, Kakuzu is wrong, and, _yes,_ he can feel.

“Don’t keep me waiting,” he blurts out. “You know how much I hate that.”

“I know,” Kakuzu snaps over his shoulder, just before a stone door slams behind him.

Sasori gathers his puppets and ducks behind a stone pillar. Lit by the glow of the purple flames, they huddle around their master, warding off the cold as he looks forward to Kakuzu’s return.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 〜(꒪꒳꒪)〜
> 
> If you liked it, or just. You know. Wanna gush about these lovely murder bfs, please leave a kudos or comment below. Otherwise, contact me on Tumblr [@thatshipcat](https://thatshipcat.tumblr.com).


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